Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disks simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all function as just one single unit where information is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all the drives shall be exactly the same all of the time, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ depending on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating smoothly until the problematic drive is changed and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives that are used for keeping any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data copied on this type of a hard drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what data will be copied on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the info on the new drive shall be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue working adequately and the problematic drive won't impact the proper operation of your websites by any means. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers called checksums to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server work with high-speed NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites noticeably. The disk drives work in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers take advantage of many different drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the site content without loss in the event a main drive stops working. In case you use our backup service, your info will be kept on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this type of configuration your info will always be safe because it will be available on many drives.